Towels are done, sweater's coming along

I managed to finish 35 of these and made the sign late last night.  I have 7 blanks left and may get some more to make for Christmas presents.   People really do like them, they're lint free, prewashed (by me), washed once again after sewing to remove the stabilizer and the iron and my arm got a workout, getting the wrinkles out after the second wash, for some reason they are sooooooo wrinkled its almost impossible to iron them although if you pay more for them, you get pre-ironed.   Oh well....it didn't kill me.    Hopefully the church will sell them all and that's my part for the Bazaar.

I have yard work to do, dead flowers to get rid of and hoses to get in.   It was pretty cold this morning when I walked the dog at 7:30 so I really need to start getting out some warmer clothes.  Also have to finish putting the film on the bedroom windows and the door in the sewing room.   Why is it I always am behind in everything I do?  I could have been working on these towels for a year, I knew they have a bazaar every Oct.  Well, I might go ahead and start soon, I would have liked to make knitted dishcloths to go with them and package them up with raffia ribbon, a towel and washcloth as a set.  Might do that next year, I have some really nifty paper ribbon that is red and white polka dots   I think I bought it once for this very purpose.

Meanwhile, my sweater is progressing, I've knitted 20 rows (I know that doesn't sound like much but remember I'm going around a humongous circle which is getting smaller by the decreases every 9 rows.  In fact after the second decrease row I was amazed at how fast I got back to the beginning.  I will have to make a swatch on the knitting machine to chart the sleeves although I have to wait till I get to the section of the circle where I put stitches on hold for sleeves to be inserted, then I can figure out how wide the top of the sleeve has to be.    I suspect the sleeve will be similar to a drop shoulder sleeve, straight across at the top (obviously I will look at the diagram in the pattern which isn't near the computer as I write this).    Anyway, I am convinced I can knit the sleeves on the machine which will make the whole thing go faster.    Our local LYS has shawl pins and I'll get one for this wonderful sweater but no sense rushing......

Working Day and Night

Well, I am working day and night but I'm enjoying every minute of it.   Our church is having a baazar early in Oct and one of their booths is called "Country Kitchen"  I had the brilliant idea that I had a bunch of flour sack towels and I would embroider redwork designs on them.  Turned out I didn't have as many as I thought I did.  Oh well I started in and you see what I got done before I ran out of towels.  So I went to a local store and got 21 more towels.  I'm now working on the last 21.  I'm doing the Days Of The Week designs on them.

When I say I'm working day and night, I mean it, I start early in the morning after walking the dog and cleaning up around the house I begin on the towels, stopping for lunch.  Then in the evening when my favorite TV shows come on I begin working on my hand knit project (the circular cardigan).  
So if you wonder where I've been---here I am, in my sewing room which is the perfect room for machine embroidery.  I can close the door when I'm done and leave things out, ready for the next day.  Perfect!

Border's done, now to decrease & decrease & decrease, etc....

I finished the border after I measured it against the HK'd one which luckily I didn't unravel yet and the MK'd one measured the same as the finished one with only 661 rows.  So then I had a dilemma, do I keep on going or do I go ahead and quit now.   Well, really that was a no-brainer, who wants to continue on for another couple hundred rows which seem to take forever when the thing was big enough already.   So I quit and started picking up stitches with my HK needles.   Now I can start another sweater on the machine while I HK this in the evening.  At least that's the plan.

I worried about how I was going to figure out how in the world to pick up 363 stitches on 661 rows, the pattern said pick up along the edge, every other row.  Well, I finally decided to just start picking up.  I counted out and marked every 100 rows and picked up evenly around.  When I was through I counted how many stitches I had and saw that I didn't have enough so joined it into a circle and knitted a row, increasing evenly around until I had 363.  Surely there's an easier way to do this but that's what I did.

After I had the proper number of stitches which I felt was important because the pattern calls for evenly decreasing so many rows until you come to the center and the decreases are really pretty if they are all lined up from border to center.   So in the picture above you see my finished border and the first 9 rows.  The makrers show every 10 stitches because I must decrease every so many rows at the markers.   This will go much faster than the border did even though its just plain knitting because I'm decreasing so many stitches often.   Once this is done I feel I might be able to do the sleeves on the machine although I guess I need to swatch on the machine and maybe chart out the sleeves with Knitware software.   That should work, right?  I hope so, I really want this done for Christmas.

Border will be done this week......

Hopefully I'l have this 858 rows done by the middle of this week but today I have a hair appointment so can't work on it although I have just done 25 rows this morning and will knit when I get home time permitting.   Here's a small record of my project since I started this border

510 rows

400 rows

600 rows

My Circular Cardigan

I've been working for over a year on this circular cardigan. I love the design and I love a circular cardigan. I bought one a few years ago when I was visiting my daughter in Tacoma. Loved the sweater, it was so comfy and cozy but it pilled savagely as soon as I washed it. To make it worse, it was a soft acrylic and stretched out of shape, making it narrower and longer. Anyway, I liked it enough to want to make one. Then I found Nigella, a sweater pattern from Berroco. It called for a super yarn spun from rayon and cotton. PROBLEM...the border is over 800 rows but a very easy lace pattern to follow. I got past that and then started the actual circle. As I knitted on this thing on and off I realized the yarn was actually stretching out of shape as I knitted. It was getting longer and longer and when I got down to the end of the circle, I realized, this was NOT going to be a sweater that I would like any better than the one I bought because of the properties of the yarn. This was a sweater that should be carefully folded on a shelf and worn only on special occasions.......not the sweater I had planned on wearing all winter when I needed something to snuggle into.   We all know a soft cotton will stretch out of shape as we wear it. Rayon is known to be iffy when washed so the combo is not my favorite for such a sweater. I finally gave up when I was supposed to be down to 17 stitches and still had 50+ on my needles (yes I was HKing this project and made a mistake or two while knitting).

I decided that as much as I loved the sweater I would have to abandon it.BUT I couldn't do it, I HAD to have that sweater so I went to my LYS and bought some wool yarn that I have knitted with before and like a lot. Shepherd's Wool by Stonehedge Fiber Mills. Its a soft Merino and should hold its shape. I also decided to change my needle from size 8 to size 7 after measuring, I think I was knitting it too loose. Then I decided, I just couldn't redo that border. I can't do it again...800+ stitches......until I realized I could probably do it on the machine. So I got out my LK 150 and spent half a day recreating that border pattern.

FROM THE FRONT

I'm now up to row 100 on the LK 150 and the results are great!  I must say, this pattern looks good from both sides.  Once the million rows are finished, I will turn it on its side and knit on another million stitches and start knitting circular which can't be done on the LK 150 but that's ok.  You are working your way down from lots and lots of stitches to around 17 stitches so every time you decrease evenly around you are working with less stitches, quite a bonus I think.

and BACK

I also think this pattern would be great as a peplum on the bottom of a pullover (with quite a few less rows of course).    See the pretty scallop?
I'm working furiously with the machine part of this sweater because I want to get it onto my HK needles.  I like to have something to HK in the evenings while I'm watching TV or traveling around.    MK is for day time for me these days.

What will I do with the tons of cotton/rayon yarn I bought?  I'm thinking it would be a super yarn to use for something like a bolero.  It can easily be machine knitted and its really a nice yarn for a smaller garment.   

Northwestern Michigan Fair

I spent a few hours each day for 3 days at the fair last week. Why? Well, the first day I went the kids were bringing in the 4H animals and I enjoyed looking at their animals as well as talking to the kids. One girl was rocking a sleeping calf's head in her lap and I asked her if she had just bought the calf or was selling it. She was selling it and said her last year's calf was being shown this year as a steer (ready for someone's freezer) She didn't seem sad or grossed out about it so obviously this girl lives on a farm and knows the difference in pets and farm animals. Still, it was nice to see she loved her calf enough to cradle his head in her lap. The kids had a hard time this year because it was sooooo hot last week, they had to spend a lot of time with their animals keeping them hydrated and hosing them down when they got stressed from the awful heat and humidity. I must comment, the barns were spotless every time I went through them, kudo's to the kids for their hard work.
The second day I went I wanted to watch the draft horse show, I love those gigantic animals.
The 3rd time I went though I went to see the needlecraft exhibits and what won prizes. I took pictures but we obviously weren't allowed to touch anything so there were times I questioned the lack of a ribbon but couldn't inspect to see why someone didn't get one, all I could do was marvel over the workmanship of the knits and the beauty of some of the entries.

I got myself a Rules Book and next year I plan on entering some knits, both hand and machine and I was thrilled to see Machine Knit was one of the categories although there were no machine knits entered. You'd better believe I came home, unraveled what I had done so far on that forever-project, Nigella, the circular sweater from Berroco. I did a gauge test on it and confirmed what I already knew, it was too loose and I am starting over with a smaller needle. I wish I could knit it on the knitting machine but its circular and would have to be grafted together later, I just can't graft stitches well enough to attempt it.

Here's some pictures that I took of knits that I would have been proud to enter, had I made them...enjoy!

This was a busy but fun Weekend

The weekend started for me on Friday evening when my son and Daughter-in-law and I went to the park, downtown Traverse City. We had tickets to Paella In The Park. Paella is a Spanish recipe which apparently is open to interpretation (just Google Paella and you'll find lots of recipes, all using different ingredients, combining rice with meat, beans, vegetables, and/or seafood, with saffron and olive oil. The festivities included 7 chefs from 7 area restaurants all well known for their cooking fare. Each chef was paired with wines from the Wineries of Old Mission Peninsula ( http://www.wineriesofoldmission.com/ ) The chefs each made 3 versions of Paella, fish, meat and vegetarian. We had our choice of 3 of any of the 21 varieties made. We also had our choice of 5 different 2 ounce samplings of wine from any of the wineries. The lines were long but these guys knew what they were doing, the lines moved fast and we were served fairly quickly. The wine was DELICIOUS as was the Paella I chose (I had one with a combo of chicken, duck and artichoke. Next I chose one with sausage and mussels (told them to hold the mussel)which was my favorite because it was hot off the cooker and spicy hot to eat. The wine I chose was a white fruity winecalled Late Harvest Riesling from Chateau Grand Traverse, I'm not really a wine drinker the other 2 I tried were Chardonnay's and I only got 3 drinks from the 5 tickets in my pocket.

Also on the agenda was a concert. Opening the concert was Rootstand, a local group who plays Reggae/Celtic/Bluegrass followed by Blues Traveler, a blues-based rock group. Actually Bluegrass can get boring after the first couple songs (my opinion, naturally)and I felt like Rootstand was more of a country-type band. Anyway, I liked them.

The opening picture shows a balloon in the background, the stage with Blues Traveler and some of the crowd that was seated in front of us. It was definitely dusk when I took the picture. Somehow my son wrangled a seat on the balloon but it remained tethered, it just raised and lowered a few times, never going much over 3 feet off the ground. (I have no idea why)...

Personally I enjoyed Rootstand's music more than Blues Traveler's but then its my age I guess :-) Anyway we went home tired, full and happy. There was a heck of a crowd but plenty of room and food so it was an enjoyable evening.

Saturday was the opening day for the Northwest Michigan Fair. I'm ashamed of myself for not having something to enter but anyway..we went Saturday and watched as the 4H'rs brought their livestock and other goodies to enter. We walked through the horse barns and the livestock barns. I stopped and talked to a young girl who was sitting in a pile of fresh hay with her calf's head in her lap, the calf was taking a nap. She told me she was going to sell the calf and that the calf she raised last year was sold to a 4-H'er who was showing the steer this year. She was also showing a steer that will be sold during the 4H Livestock Market Auction. That brought back lots of memories of my kids doing the same when we lived in the U.P. of Michigan years ago. Sunday we went back and watched a Draft Horse Driving show. We also walked around checking out rabbits, llama and alpaca barns. Fun. I peeked in the 4H and adult exhibition buildings to see what knits had been entered. I swear next year I'm going to enter a knit but need to find a book with the rules, etc. Will ask when I go back to see the results of the judging later this week. Here's some photos of the animals we looked at yesterday.....
And the 4H winner of the draft horse pulling event was a young boy who definitely was at ease with his horse and never had a bit of trouble following the judges wishes, (back up, turn, etc).